Welcome to NEPCA Fantastic, the official blog of the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (a.k.a. NEPCA), a regional affiliate of the Popular Culture Association and the American Culture Association. Founded in 2008 and online since 2010, we seek to provide both a resource to potential presenters and a gateway to furthering the study of the intermedia traditions of the fantastic in all their varied forms.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

CFP Pirates: Lifting the Jolly Roger in History and Popular Culture Collection (3/1/17)

Pirates: Lifting the Jolly Roger in History and Popular Culture
Edited by Antonio Sanna

Since the times of their brutal aggressions to vessels journeying over the seven seas, pirates have firmly captured the imagination of writers, directors and producers all over the world and have elicited an incredible impact over contemporary culture. Pirates have been studied and represented by Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, but they have also appeared in the works of William Shakespeare, Ann Radcliffe and Lord Byron. Although their fictional representation is very different from the reality of the (either duller or more atrocious) actions that they actually committed, these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers have modelled and defined the figure of the maritime outlaws that is still firmly impressed in our minds: expert mariners, bold hunters for treasures who were often obsessed with revenge, vulgar and ruthless predators roaming the coasts and the deep seas of the five continents. Cinema has equally invested in such a figure, from Albert Parker's The Black Pirate (1926), Michael Curtiz's The Black Hawk (1940) and Disney's Treasure Island (1950) to the successful saga Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-2017) – whose most recent instalment will be in cinemas in 2017 – and Shinji Aramaki's Space Pirate Captain Harlock (2013). Nevertheless, the figure of the pirate has not been confined to these media and has freely roamed through theatre, the visual arts, manga, anime, video games and park rides, thus demonstrating its centrality in contemporary popular culture.
This anthology will explore the figure of the pirate from multidisciplinary perspectives. This volume seeks previously-unpublished essays that explore the heterogeneous representations of both historical figures and fictional characters. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. There are indeed several themes worth exploring when analyzing the historical and fictional representation of pirates, utilizing any number of theoretical frameworks of your choosing.

Contributions may include (but are not limited to) the following topics:

Historical pirates (in the seven seas)

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary pirates

Twentieth-century and contemporary representations of pirates in literature

Manga and anime

Pirates in the visual arts and on the stage

The Pirates of the Caribbean saga

Video games

Pirates and philosophy

Pirates and sea creatures (including monsters and mermaids)

Humour, Black Humour and the Macabre

Gender and queer readings

Ecocriticism

Alienation and misperception, conformity/nonconformity

Disfigurement, deformity and (dis)ability

Death and the afterlife

Adaptations, Remakes and Appropriations

Music in films on pirates

Fan practice and fan communities

The anthology will be organized into thematic sections around these topics and others that emerge from submissions. We are open to works that focus on other topics as well and authors interested in pursuing other related lines of inquiry. Feel free to contact the editor with any questions you may have about the project and please share this announcement with colleagues whose work aligns with the focus of this volume.
Submit a 300-500 word abstract of your proposed chapter contribution, a brief CV and complete contact information to Dr. Antonio Sanna (isonisanna@hotmail.com) by 1 March 2016. Full chapters of 4000-6000 words would be due by June/July 2017. Note: all full chapters submitted will be included subject to review.

interdisciplinary from cfp.english.upenn.edu

film and television from cfp.english.upenn.edu

theatre from cfp.english.upenn.edu

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Call for Papers 2017

The 2017 meeting of NEPCA will convene at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, from 27-28 October 2017, and, in conjunction with NEPCA, the Fantastic (Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction) Area is pleased to announce that the call for papers for our tenth-anniversary sessions is now available. Given the proximity to Halloween, we are especially interested in proposals that explore the motif of the monstrous but will also consider proposals outside that topic that relate to the fantastic. Scholars of all levels are invited to submit individual proposals or proposals for complete sessions; submissions will be accepted until 1 June 2017. Further details are available in the posted call for papers.